I’ve not flown BA in quite awhile given that I’ve relocated back to the US. I have roughly 210k Avios and wanted to list the barriers to booking award flights that I’ve just discovered in the hope that I’m doing something wrong (and that my Avios aren’t worthless). I used a variety of dates for Spring 2020 and the results all seemed to be identical. My planned route was DTW - LHR (in Club) for a stay of roughly 7 days. What I encountered:

1. Flights not at all available - this I expected.
2. On dates where there was availability, only routings with a change of airport (LGA to JFK or DCA to IAD) were displayed, along with a notice in red that costs for transportation between airports were not included - this seems cynically designed to maximize the level of inconvenience.
3. Selecting one of these options to see what the final cost would be, I was a bit stunned to see that it would 130k Avios plus roughly USD$1,700. Digging further into the $1,700 I discovered something called “Insurance and Security Surcharge” of $1,300.




So my question is whether this is a standard charge only for award redemptions or for all BA flight tickets? Is it typical that BA.com only shows the most inconvenient routings? I don’t recall in the pre-Avios days that booking an award was made so difficult and expensive. Clearly every airline can charge whatever they’d like, but at some point if one is unable to book a moderately normal ticket without paying enormous fake fees, then what’s the actual point of the program?